Searching for Radioactivity
by laurachampignon
Summary: Misty awakes from a head injury to find that her entire village has been destroyed by the military. With her family and best friend gone and limited supplies, she seeks a far off civilisation that can't even be fully promised to her. Only... she didn't expect to not be the sole survivor of the attack. Themes from: "The Host", "Blood Diamond" and "Radioactive" by Imagine Dragons


**Chapter One**

My eyes opened a slither. I seemed conscious enough that I could figure out three things: that a) I wasn't dead; b) I was lying on the cold ground, and that ground was made up of loose dirt that blew into my nose when I breathed in; and c) The back of my head really hurt. I must have been hit. Hard. I attempted to open my eyes further, and lifted my head enough to see something, anything, ahead of me, but my vision was still blurry and my head ached in protest of the movement. My head slumped back onto the cold ground, eyes closing once more, and taking one deep breath before sighing out again.

After what felt like hours, my legs started to go numb and my body just felt… weak from hunger. I couldn't even remember how long it had been since I had eaten… or even how long I had been lying here. Eventually I forced my arms which had been splayed out at right angles above my head, down to the level of my underarms and pushed up, heaving my weight onto hands and knees. I sat back on my boot heels and raised my head to finally come to terms with the damaged village. It was worse than previously expected, although I didn't know why it wasn't expected… maybe because it was the place that I had lived my whole life; where all my family and friends had lived. _Lived. _

I almost broke – I wanted to snap in half as easily as a bread stick – but I pushed away as much grief as I could, knowing that if I didn't get up and move soon, they'd notice I survived and come back for me, killing me at any slight movement. They'd already done a pretty good job at destroying my life. All the triangular huts that were once made of cured camel skins and polished tree branches were now smouldering and burnt beyond saving. The last of any skins were being eaten up my lingering flames, leaving a black line rising up with the flame. Smoke billowed from each individual hut and joined together some five metres above the village, making the whole atmosphere difficult to breathe in.

I stood up unwillingly. The smoke stung my eyes, where it didn't have the opportunity on the ground. Everything smelt like… burnt wood and fire. Usually it would be such a comforting scent, providing warmth, light and a sign of a cooked meal and storytelling. Now it meant death, destruction and loss. My eyes now being elevated to my normal height, I was able to fully appreciate the complete tragedy of the event.

Bodies littered the ground. Adults, teens, children… infants. A variety of all ages were just… dead. I walked closer towards the village. I could see now that there was blood pooling around most of the bodies, mostly from cracked skulls or from bones that tore through the skin when they were broken. Some had been burnt to death, their bodies turned black and crisped, a look of utter horror frozen on their faces. It was always the people burnt alive that had put up a fight. Feeling nauseous, I started weaving through the little alleys between huts to my house, which was located right next door to where my parents and younger brother and sister lived.

I had moved in there about four months ago, feeling crowded with the rest of my family. It wasn't unusual for people my age to do the same. It was a sign that your parents thought you to be responsible when they allowed you to move out of home. I shared the little house with my friend Willow, whose parents lived on the opposite side to my own. When I arrived there, there wasn't much left. I entered the now burnt out hut, finding the remains of my whole life to be ashes that crumbled underneath my feet as I walked. That included my best friend's charcoal black skeleton-like arm, which I didn't notice I was half standing on until my foot rolled forward with the step I was on, since I was distracted with the steel box that lived under my bed, which managed to somehow miraculously survive.

Now distracted with Willow's body – victim to the fire that had destroyed our home – a small sob escaped my trembling being. Something like this was never meant to happen. We were meant to die together, not have one before the other. That was just unfair that _they _could come in here like that and take away my 'unrelated sister'. Looking at her distorted features, it was difficult to even decipher that it was even her. Her face was twisted into an expression of deep terror from her last pain-filled moments, as the tent would have collapsed under her, engulfing her in red-hot flames. The images haunted me from behind my now closed eyes. I opened them in a panic, suddenly remembering the metal box.

The box had a black powder covering the warm silver metal, but it was in otherwise relatively good condition. The bed had been completely eaten away by the fire, and so only a pile of ashes and random blocks of black wood remained surrounding the box. I took it out, and carried it to the corner of the small room, facing away from Willow. The padlock numbers were stiff, but I managed to turn them all the same. The lid half-opened with a small struggle, protesting against the friction the powder, rust and metal all made when scraping together. With a few small tugging motions, it popped off, and creaked backwards onto its hinges.

The purpose of the silver box was for this precise moment. We had all known that this moment was coming – like it did for all the villages in our small country. The military went from settlement to settlement, burning anything that looked as though it could harbour life and killing anyone in its path. A village as big as ours was like a delicacy for them – something that they rarely stumbled upon. Truthfully, I was surprised that our town had lasted this long. We'd been preparing for ages. Most families created boxes like mine and Willow's, which contained satchels filled with bare essentials – enough to last however long it took to reach the next town over.

Because Willow had perished in the attack, this meant that I had extra. I checked the bag to make sure nothing was missing. There was nothing quite like being halfway across the desert and finding out you only had one litre of water when you thought you had four. Everything seemed to be there: five litres of water, a blanket and a packet of biscuits. Not completely nutritious, but enough to sustain me for a day or two.

Satisfied I had enough supplies, I scrambled out of what used to be a tent, and hurried to the outskirts of town, looing ahead of me the whole time, not wanting to see the same twisted faces as Willow had, but on hundreds of unidentifiable people; or the disfigured skulls of babies, with their brains splashing on the dirt streets or pooling on their mother's chests, tear marks still gleaming on their cheeks from when they had failed to be able to protect their children.

I kept walking, the orange sun starting to set to my right. Its rays shone through my eyelashes as I stared ahead, making my eyes squint slightly. To my left, the giant sister planet, Aurora, cast its confronting blue and purple silhouette on our planet, Orone. The path led me through the outskirts of the village, and over a small hill, which I knew that once I descended it, the village would be out of sight forever, which is where I wanted to leave it.

I never would have developed the curiosity of there being more survivors if I hadn't seen one just in front of my eyes as I began walking down the hill into the sunset.


End file.
